Top 3 Trends Of Social Media Marketing In 2014

Social media marketing is the buzzword today, but still many businesses are rather slow to adapt a social media strategy for marketing their products and services. Every now and then new social media platforms are appearing while the existing ones, like Twitter and Facebook are continuously evolving to keep themselves abreast with the dynamics of the changing market. Thus keeping in mind the changing dynamics there are trends that would be doing rounds in the coming times. We will discuss them in detail through following points

1. Investment and strong presence on social media

Investment and continuous strong presence on social media platforms has become a necessity today. The rise of Facebook, Twitter and the ever increasing presence and mushrooming of businesses like Hubspot and Mashable it’s absolutely necessary for the businesses to have a strong continuous presence on social media channels. The best way to be successful on social media platforms is to integrate social media into your businesses marketing plan. This helps to generate more leads, more referrals and sharing, higher brand recognition which in turn gives you higher ROI. Word of mouth, brand awareness, advertising, direct interaction and improved search rankings are few major benefits from having strong, engaging and continuously updating social media pages.

2. Rise of Google+ and LinkedIn

The recent rise of Google+ is evident from the fact that it is just second to Facebook with regard to the number of monthly network users and this user base is continuously rising. Google + is proving to be more effective than just a normal social network, it provides for integration of Google+ pages for higher SEO rankings. It also improves social signals and provides more personalized and better search experience for its users. Google+ also gives its users the option of integration with YouTube channel. For example if you want to share a video from your YouTube page on Google+ then the users/connections will have the option of not only viewing your video in Google+ but also if they are commenting anything there i.e. on your Google+ page then the same would get reflected as comments on your YouTube Channel & video.

LinkedIn since its inception has been enjoying the no. 1 position as a social networking site for professionals and boasting a reach of about 240 million users. LinkedIn has added another option by launching its influencers program, this would further make it a source for better content and curation. This Influencers program allows and give options to selected experts or “thought leaders” of sharing original/quality content directly with different LinkedIn users. Thus this increases the bandwidth of services provided by LinkedIn. Earlier it was an important source of information for professionals and now it will be providing insights from some of the best leaders and experts in the business.

3. Rise of Image and micro videos

It has been a well-known fact that a person is more interested and learns better from a pictorial representation than just a simple text. There are so many studies that shows users are more likely to engage/click/share posts with videos or images than just simple text-based contents. If you are posting important information with eyeballs grabbing graphics or images it will surely help you to stand out and get better traction/views. This explain the ever increasing use of infographics in contents as it not only makes the content livelier but also makes it more interesting to read.

Instragram and Vine have brought about a revolution in real-time. These platforms allow you to create short pieces on your smartphone with 15 seconds max for Instragram and 6 seconds max of vine and share this instantly with your fans. There are plethora of benefits of using videos and images in social media marketing for the businesses both small and big so it is quite natural to adopt these strategies to keep pace with the changing business dynamics.